As cultures ancient and modern continue their clash along the bleeding arc from Timbuktu to Afghanistan, America’s policy mandarins are searching for a way out of a dilemma that has existed since the First Crusade. The more men at arms sent into Islamic territory, the greater the indignation generated. A thousand years has not reduced the alacrity with which pious and evangelical Muslims respond to the appearance of armed unbelievers—from the 11th century to the 21st, they have seldom taken long to boil over into insurrection.

The traditional root of this response can be traced to Islam’s own military expansion, and it comes built into cultures as structurally diverse as the Tuareg of the Sahara and the seagoing sultanates of Oman and Borneo. It is a tendency so deeply embedded that the only colonial cultures to coexist with it for long, from the French occupation of Algeria to the Crusader kingdoms of the Levant, have needed civilian transmigration atop military occupation to survive.

But while such cultural transplants have survived rejection for a century (or three, in the case of the kingdoms of Jerusalem and Cyprus), occupying powers unprepared to repopulate Islamic lands and expel recidivists have been expelled in a few generations.

“Even though the Arabs’ language gave the world the word ‘alcohol,’ their religion took it away.”

One metric of the intensity of this cultural repulsion is the fate of earlier traditions of food and drink under Islam. Even though the Arabs’ language gave the world the word “alcohol,” their religion took it away.

Yet if visitors dig deep enough, they will discover as Frankish Crusaders and French and British armies did, that there are bottles for sale in every bazaar in paynimry—Dar al-Islam is just another name for an archipelago of bootleggers spanning the seven seas.

Though ostensibly dry as desert landscapes, Islamic nations float on lakes of home brew, like the cognac atop a pousse-café. Despite the constant vigilance of the mullahs who run Iran, there is plenty of Shirazi wine in Shiraz, and Lebanon and Syria remain awash in absinthe’s ancestor, raki. Libyans and Tunisians secretly tipple date brandy, and even Mauritania’s firebrand marabouts have been known to fuel their sermons against the infidel with a swig or two of palm toddy. Get used to it. Jihad is thirsty work, and the stuff those cupbearers are handing out in Persian miniatures ain’t cold tea.

The quest to quench the holy warrior’s bone-deep thirst brings us to the bleeding edge of political science. Many analysts ponder how to stanch the decade-old hemorrhage that is the occupation of Afghanistan. Never mind its misbegotten origins in neocon hubris or the rejected lessons of failed invasions past. Let us be mission-oriented in considering how to pacify this troubled land. As I am an American scientist, I shall naturally look to high technology for a solution. The way out of our Afghan impasse is to reinvent the drone as part of the SBI: the Strategic Beer Initiative.

The SBI draws its inspiration from a Wisconsin firm at the cutting edge of aerial warfare, Lakemaid Beer. The producers of “the hottest beer on ice” have produced a Super Bowl-quality commercial demonstrating how “octocopters” or even smaller user-friendly flying drones can loft frosty six-packs over frozen lakes to slake the thirst of ice fishermen. Before the air-control freaks of the FAA could put the kibosh on this splendid display of Yankee—or at least North Woods—ingenuity, the ad went viral. What’s not to like about hearing “The Ride of the Valkyries” play as drones cute as Star Wars robots swoop down delivering not death from above, but life-giving lager?

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Since consumers loved it and sales soared, it is sad to see the FAA bring down this high-flying ad campaign. But though Lakemaid’s president, Jack Supple, has been buried in an avalanche of federal paperwork, his tribulation may hold a lesson for our troops in the field in South Asia and elsewhere. Inspired by this unsung patriot, the SBI aims to prove that there is more than one way to bring the war to the enemy.

With even Taco Bell pondering helidrone delivery and Domino’s Pizza already flying saucer-like through the air, some of America’s more frankly paramilitary outfits, such as FedEx, have aimed to augment delivery trucks with drone fleets in the next five years—the Federal Aviation Agency projects “7,500 unmanned aircraft in the skies within that period if regulations are in place.” If our military-industrial complex can field a fleet of industrial-strength drones, surely we can spare our troops a hundred glorified toy helis of the sort used in beer commercials. But what for?

For all their gallantry, our forces on the firing line in Afghanistan have learned like the Russians, British, Mughals, and Macedonians before them that exchanging potshots with Pathans on a hot day just makes them ornery.

So instead of having embattled NATO troops call home so an air-conditioned warrant officer on the outskirts of Las Vegas can enjoy firing a sixty-thousand-dollar Hellfire from a four-million-dollar Predator at a two-bit emplacement of hot and thirsty jihadis squatting behind rocks half a world away, why not give the grunts deployed in the ’Stans an air force of their own?

Imagine the Taliban’s tactical dismay if, instead of blowing up a wedding in hope of winging some second cousin of Bin Laden’s late brother-in-law, America’s standard operating procedure on a hot day in the Hindi Kush would be to send a TV-guided octocopter to bombard the petulant Pathans with icy twelve-packs of Old India Pale Ale. Nobody—Sunni, Shiite, or Assassin—in that land of mirth and murder is likely to turn down a frosty brewski or three when it’s 120 degrees in the absent shade, which in terms of the operational art means the farangs’ diabolical High Brewsade will befuddle the irate indigenes’ aim. Or it may put them to sleep entirely, for at the end of the day, Afghanistan remains a land where opium is the opium of the masses.

Though she was short, squat, and still learning to read at age forty, none who encountered her handiwork could doubt that Suzy Simmons was numbered among the Lord’s elect. She could cook like an angel.

A latticework of shortbread encrusted her cherry pies, the golden skin of her fried chicken shattered like the walls of Jericho at the blast of a fork, and a stiff southwesterly breeze could carry away her meringues. Old men and small children looked forward to winter’s coming, for only in the depths of January would she unleash the alchemical array of mason jars that swallowed the Jersey peach crop by the bushel the summer before.

As to how she accomplished these miracles in the years after World War II, we have mostly the witness of children, for only a few rare kinescope films have captured illiterate Southern cooks transmitting their lore to their apprentices. Only memory can testify to their heroic service at home in the years Julia Child spent abroad for her nation’s sake. While Mr. McWilliams’s daughter was abroad in Asia and Africa confounding our enemies, or in Paris learning to lard our arteries with duck-fat frites and beurre noir, Suzy Simmons sang angelically in a Baptist choir and mastered the most diabolical substance in the arsenal of infarction.

“In that innocent age, who knew that ingesting saturated fats that are rock-solid at room temperature could turn your arteries to lead?”

Her secret weapon was Crisco.

For those who have only encountered corned-beef hash in the middle episodes of Mad Men and been spared scrapple entirely, a bit of nutritional history is in order. There once was a time when New Yorkers and Philadelphians scoured the countryside each fall to stockpile reserves of hog lard and butter fat adequate to see their households through the calorie-intensive rigors of a winter without central heating. The result was a mid-Atlantic Victorian cuisine that made Puritan fare seem sybaritic.

While Boston luxuriated in cod cheeks, corn dodgers, and veal and oyster pie, those west of the Hudson might awake to cornmeal mush fried in lard, or if upwardly mobile, lard-fried cornmeal mush laced with minced hog jowls. Traveling overland in the mid-20th century, you might one morning reach the southerly latitude at which the hog was dispensed with entirely and grits were served up in the state of nature. Wise Northerners spared themselves that risk by taking express trains south to their winter quarters in Florida. All the good Southern cooking they could want awaited them at home, for the truth of the matter is that talented black cooks fled North after the Civil War in numbers that put the Underground Railroad to shame.

Once they passed the Mason-Dixon Line the Virginian forebears of folk like Suzy Simmons took the region’s kitchens by storm. Those who employed them might insist they placate the household gods each morning with ancestral offerings such as scrapple, but by the cocktail hour the Northern matriarchs were routed. Who in their right mind would dine on croquettes while cooks who could put Colonel Sanders to shame stood by? Not content to suborn the South’s kitchen retainers, the damned Yankees armed them with the latest in high-tech tools—not just gas stoves and electric waffle irons, but semi-synthetic trans fats that surpassed lard as a frying and shortening agent by a margin unseen since dynamite took over from gunpowder in the blasting trade.

Like some chemical warfare agent in a Day-Glo warning can, Crisco came in electric-blue cylinders of amazing size. They opened to reveal what looked for all the world like a highly refined plastic explosive, a shining snow-white gel, as tasteless and odorless as it was opaque. Plopped in a massive iron skillet, it melted away instantly into fluid clear as glass, gaining heat until it was hot enough to melt tin. Once at the smoking point, this formidable vegetable shortening could transform flour, corn, shellfish, and fowl into some of America’s crowning culinary achievements.

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Civilians can still experiment with hydrogenated fats at home, but while Catalan chefs can play with liquid nitrogen and celebrate candy-bar food additives such as lecithin as though they were the Philosopher’s Stone, heaven help the one Mayor Bloomberg catches with a can of Crisco.

The history of science behind the Crisco abolitionists’ case amplifies the nostalgia. Hydrogenated fats came as an answer to one of the defeated South’s regional prayers—Lord, find us a use for cottonseed!

Their answer came shortly after the Great War ended, when a chemist named Raney turned a nickel-aluminum alloy into a catalyst that let even rancid cottonseed pressings soak up hydrogen enough to transform the stuff into the apotheosis of lard. Once they saw it and discovered it was not redolent of pig but instead perfectly tasteless, chefs went hog-wild with the stuff, and the already fat-happy cuisine of the Confederacy’s Mardi gras sector erupted into a golden age of airy corn fritters, crunchy fried oysters, and other crispy critters whose flavors the transparently bland trans fat allowed to shine through.

Today’s nanny state may deem Crisco a felony in a can, but in that innocent age, who knew that ingesting saturated fats that are rock-solid at room temperature could turn your arteries to lead? And who could resist the ravishing tide of all things fried that turned black cooks into unsuspecting agents of post-antebellum revenge? Once Madison Avenue started advertising this weapon of mass infarction, Crisco-powered cuisine rolled across America faster than Sherman could march though Georgia. By the outbreak of WWII, Southern-fried chicken had joined apple pie and Thanksgiving turkeys as part of the nation’s culinary patrimony.

I could go on, wondering why all the millions who have crossed our border from the creature’s native Mayan lands have brought along nary a decent turkey molé recipe, but it is time to head out with a shotgun into the archipelago south of Plymouth to see if any birds want to join us for Thanksgiving dinner. Though the ritual hunt rarely succeeds, it always affords exercise enough to excuse a courtesy call on Colonel Sanders on the bleak way home.

Hurricane Gore is about to come ashore with another gale-force climate sermon. Interviews that the former next president has been giving suggest 24 Hours of Reality is calculated to make markets crash. The question is: Which ones?

Al Gore has already told fellow communitarian climate maven Joe Romm that public and private investment must be bent to the view that fossil fuels are best left in the ground:

There are $7 trillion worth carbon assets on the books of multinational energy companies….The valuation of those companies and their assets is now based on the assumption that all of those carbon assets are going to be sold and burned. And they are not. The global scientific community has just reaffirmed that No [sic] more than one-third can ever possibly be burned without destroying the future.

Invoking the subprime mortgage crisis, he added:

This carbon bubble is going to burst….People can make short-term profits by playing the psychology of the markets. But if you’re a long-term investor and you do not take into account the stranded-assets potential for carbon-based equities and debt instruments, in my view you’re making a mistake.

Romm concludes that divesting endowments from fossil-fuel companies is “not just the morally right thing to do for a university, foundation, or pension fund—it was a financially smart move for any such long-term investor.” The markets appear to differ, perhaps because analysts have run some inconvenient numbers.

“America has, wonder of wonders, become the world’s largest energy producer.”

Legitimate as concern over oil imports and climate change may be, domestic fossil-fuel production has been ramping up, and America has, wonder of wonders, become the world’s largest energy producer.

This may be bad news for posterity, for however slow, manmade climate forcing remains as pernicious as inflation; but in terms of letting the present generation live long lives, there is a case for civilization continuing to indulge in the use of fire. Americans generate over 20 tons of carbon dioxide annually, Kazakhstanis over 13, Israelis over 10. Even though sorely handicapped by their nuclear electric system, the French manage a respectable six tons per capita.

Still, there are laggards, nations so backward that they are not pulling their weight in the race to outdo nature as a source of climate change. Despite India’s burgeoning economy, its billion citizens added a feeble two parts per million of CO2 to their share of the world’s air each year, while Pakistanis barely manage one.

Burning under three pounds of fuel a day for all purposes from cooking and heating to transport may seem austere to some, but Deep Greens deem even the carbon footprint of a Cuban campesino shockingly profligate. Seeking to reverse increases in gases that warm the planet, they applaud Al Gore’s demand for a 90% cut in US CO2 emissions by 2050. This means America must undercut the fuel economy of sunny Iraq at ~3 tons per capita of CO2, or Cuba at 2, and emulate the few, the proud nations that have become avatars of Earth Day by emitting less than a ton of CO2 per capita annually.

Which one to aim for is for democracy to determine, so before you vote Green or emigrate this Election Day consider this list of ten low-cal nations whose cool energy example America can follow into a central-heating-free future:

The winners are:

CO2 per capita

KG

LIFE EXPECTANCY

Paraguay

742

78.0

Angola

505

38.6

Sudan

287

50.3

Zambia

204

38.5

Ethiopia

103

50.4

Rwanda

63

50.1

Cambodia

39

63.4

Afghanistan

29

43.9

Chad

13

48.3

Somalia

3

50.7

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It might broaden the horizons of foundation execs that favor the soft-energy path to drop in on the above list in descending order. But what about their portfolios? Militant greens are already Mau-Mauing universities nationwide to divest endowments and pension funds of energy stocks.

There are billions of dollars of alternative-energy assets on the books of the multinational venture funds Al Gore has advised. Many of these are bets against fossil energy companies. The valuation of the alternative-energy portfolios is now based on the assumption that eco-politicians such as Al can veto the sale of most of those carbon assets to support the artificially high prices needed to save alternative energy from bankruptcy.

But carbon prohibition is not going to happen, however much policy makers try to paint the scientific tape. Energy prices have inflated far faster than climate has changed.

The real object of “absurd overvaluation” is Gore’s apocalyptic climate rhetoric. Though he declared a “climate crisis” a quarter-century ago, rising seas have yet to flood his penny loafers. In reality, global temperatures have risen only a few tenths of a degree in all that time.

There is instead a clear and present danger that the “alternative energy” bubble Gore helped inflate is about to burst as shale gas and tar-sand oil flood the market and further float the prices of energy and fossil-fuel equities and bonds. In contrast, the solar selloff and Europe’s wind-power-driven fiscal woes put alternative-energy touts in the same pickle as the Morgan bankers peddling subprime mortgages before the economic crash.

While green entrepreneurs such as Gore have made short-term profits by playing the psychology of the markets, few technologies are more volatile than alt-energy plays predicated on celebrity or intellectual fashion. Prudent fiduciaries and long-term investors must consider the stranded-asset downside of solar and wind-based equities and debt instruments if reality-based climate projections prevail over green rhetoric in determining investment strategy.

Where would college football be if games were played only every other year and coaches were unable to recruit enough freshmen to replace graduating seniors? In the last decade, egalitarian college admissions policies have turned into a sort of athletic neutron bomb that leaves stadium sports intact while threatening less popular ones with demographic extinction.

Consider Yale’s century-old polo team. Last year it scheduled a match to continue its long rivalry with Harvard. The event appeared on the calendar of the host field and alumni invitations were duly mailed, but as the date approached, it became increasingly clear that Yale could not muster a foursome to play the game. Its varsity team had, in large part, up and graduated last June. Harvard had to go offshore and invite Holland’s university team.

Great sports programs are built on finding enough freshmen to field a hierarchy of teams of increasingly skilled upperclassmen. Such was the case when the great Ivy rivalries began, but in many sports, today’s coaches are hard-pressed to find one potential player in a whole incoming class.

“The Big Apple’s teachers’ unions are out to euthanize any sport more competitive than Frisbee or concussive than a Nerf ball.”

It isn’t only low-profile sports that are endangered. Connoisseurship, specialized clubs, and esoteric curricula are all but dead. Every Saturday, Princeton’s Nassau Street saw snuff-bottle-collecting alumni teaching the finer points to their undergraduate opposite numbers. Harvard’s Widener Library boasted a ten-thousand-volume collection of antique fishing books intended to encourage wannabe Isaak Waltons, while high above Cayuga’s waters, Cornell’s view of higher education encompassed undergraduates majoring in horticulture. Alongside works on literary theory, university library shelves groaned under the weight of books on big-game hunting.

No longer. Connoisseurship clubs have been decimated and denounced as insensitive to the feelings of the differently cultured and indifferently gendered. Harvard’s vegan Mafiosi rejoice at the fearsomely fishy Fearing Collection’s banishment to a fate worse than burning. Locked in a distant repository, the books will never again tempt stack-browsing undergraduates to get out and experience the innocent pleasures of blood sports.

American academe’s politically correct passion for safety and mediocrity contrasts radically with events elsewhere in the world. China’s latest Cultural Revolution is spearheaded by Great Wall Gatsbys hell-bent to make up for all the time they lost under the dictatorship of the proletariat. At first this merely meant turning Shanghai’s Bund into a luxury-lined clone of Bond Street, but what would Chairman Mao make of this mandarin Mr. Samgrass’s confusion of Ralph Lauren and reality?:

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Tianjin Goldin Metropolitan Polo Club

Thrilling polo tournaments are scheduled year round, whether played on snow, on grass or in the arena. Exciting youth activities are also being developed for budding young riders and China’s polo players of the future.

Metropolitan Intervarsity Polo 2013…saw representation from polo teams from the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, Harvard University and Yale University.

The Club hopes that the tournament will raise the awareness of polo amongst the region’s youth and widen the horizons of Chinese youth and allow them to experience the beautiful game of polo as well as instill in them the values being driven off the back of polo….

An atmosphere of gaiety began to gradually develop as Tianjin Goldin Metropolitan Polo Club members, invited guests as well as alumni from all four universities who have travelled specially to Tianjin to support their alma maters cheered for their favorite teams.

The Great Helmsman must be cringing in his grave as the Gang of Four’s children gallop overhead and the vanguard of the polo-playing proletariat cheers the Red Army 20-goal team to carry socialism’s banner forward to Smith’s Lawn and Boca Raton.

Despite Asia’s escape from Marxist gloom, New York’s Bloombergian nanny state isn’t about to embrace Oxford’s Dangerous Sports Club or endorse snow polo in Central Park. The Taliban may be content to suppress kite flying and soccer, but the Big Apple’s teachers’ unions are out to euthanize any sport more competitive than Frisbee or concussive than a Nerf ball.

What 21st century dean or provost would dare sanction un-helmeted intramural football’s return or the stabling of hunters within the halls of ivy? Today’s textbooks have expunged all trace of how “elitist” sports once overflowed into popular culture. New York’s Polo Grounds once hosted the Yankees, Giants, and Mets. Yale’s fictional polo captain, Flash Gordon, starred in Saturday serials and Sunday funnies alike. No longer. With second-graders being expelled for fashioning Pop-Tarts into popguns, it’s hard to recall that the favorite big stick of America’s greatest progressive president was an elephant gun.

In Teddy Roosevelt’s day, Americans considered polo a natural extension of the nation’s cowboy culture. Even the American Museum of Natural History had a team, and the “Father of American Football,” Yale’s Walter C. Camp, was a rated two-goal player. Only a few decades ago, you could still see Harvard history professors riding to class to lecture in jodhpurs and hear the winding of hunting horns add to the joyous noise of football games. Imagine how PETA would greet any postmodern college dean who smiled at the sight of rhino heads on dorm walls or tiger skins on the floors.

Though it may be hard to bring back Princeton’s Tigers, the last decade has not been a lost one. It has seen the successful revival of many decimated equestrian, polo, and shooting clubs in a transcontinental arc from Harvard to USC, but in the long run, cultural conservation is youth’s concern. Unless America’s surviving Sloanes and Hooray Henrys rise up against the craven democratic Homintern that threatens the real cultural pluralism of today’s universities, the implosion of fun into its most common denominator may continue.

Seven score and twenty-something years ago, a boat crossed the Atlantic from Hoboken, New Jersey for a day sail around the Isle of Wight. Thirty proper yachts vied with the sharp pilot schooner America at the start of the All Nations Race, but not one boat was left in sight when she finished to win the 100 guineas worth of bad Victorian silver that symbolized American nautical supremacy for a century thereafter.

Sports history’s longest winning streak did not come easy. It kept the New York Yacht Club’s naval architects and sea lawyers busy adding speed to boats and chicanery to the rule book for six generations, driving yacht design relentlessly forward as the rest of the world sought to take away the object of ever growing desire that stood bolted on the wall in a niche at the clubhouse on 44th Street.

“Stars and Stripes…showed an alarming tendency to come out of the water like a flying fish if the wind popped beyond a breeze.”

Beating off the European challenges for the Cup began soon after the Civil War ended, leading to technological feats of bizarre precocity. A decade before aluminum framed the first zeppelin, the newfangled metal formed the hull of the equally enormous sloop Defender. The escalation culminated in designs that fit form and function so flawlessly, they flowed into art. The only vessels arguably more beautiful than the J-class boats that challenged and defended in the years between the World Wars are the small but perfect 12-meter yachts that extended the NYYC winning streak to 22 consecutive victories by 1980. It wasn’t even close. So fierce was the competition to defend the Cup that even in the depths of the Depression, one New York syndicate recruited a mad keen Princeton sailor named Einstein to its Tuxedo Park brain trust, only to have their boat, Whirlwind, come in second.

Yet for all the competition, the Cup remained a decidedly amateur sport whose postwar revival saw one family commission and crew a wooden 12-meter in which they avidly competed for the right to defend the Cup. Easterner still sails, and occasionally wins, in classic boat races up and down the East Coast, but all good things must come to an end. As the 12-meter boats pushed the envelope of hydrodynamic perfection, their performance stalled. Single-hulled sailboats, never rattlingly fast to begin with, suddenly began to look a lot slower when surfboards and Hobie Cats entered our coastal culture.

The exhilarating speed of multihulls gave rise to a whole new sport, as high-speed multihull races and raids won a following in France. Transatlantic and ’round-the-world sailing records were mowed down by the ever faster multihulls. This level of design innovation soon melded with computer science in Australia and elsewhere, and the summer of 1983 finally witnessed an inevitable confrontation in Newport—on their fourth try, the Australians came up with a 12-meter perceptibly faster than any American design and a pitch-perfect crew to sail her. Neither the tactical genius of Dennis Connor nor the weather wizardry of Halsey Herreshoff, the grandson of Defender’s designer, could stave off the inevitable. They won three races in their slower boat, but the Australians won four with their faster one.

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The result turned the sailing world upside down. Connor duly won the Cup back—not for New York, but San Diego? Once there, the East Coast had to bite the bullet and join the Left Coast in defending it against all comers, the first of whom soon appeared out of the antipodes, lawyered up and demanding the right to race on the grandiose scale of yore. Up from Down Under came the mighty Kiwi mega-scow New Zealand with 90 feet of waterline and a deck big as a cricket pitch. Unable to field a “like vessel” in the six months dictated by the century-old “deed of gift” governing Cup races, San Diego countered with a catamaran.

Stars and Stripes was not your average Hobie, but a sixty-foot carbon-fiber hot rod with a 104-foot-high rigid wing sail that looked like a pterodactyl on steroids. This drove the boat so seriously fast—well over twice wind speed (trust me—I crewed in the shakedown), that she showed an alarming tendency to come out of the water like a flying fish if the wind popped beyond a breeze.

But while those of us who lobbied for more speed had gotten more than we bargained for, nobody actually died. Not this time around—being airborne is now part of the professional game, and when the boats racing in San Francisco lose control, they come crashing down on the water. The first death came in the Luis Vuitton challenger trials earlier in the summer, when Sweden’s Artemis cartwheeled over her hundred-foot-high wing mast, fatally slamming Olympic sailor Andy Simpson into San Francisco Bay. These are boats in name only, skidding along on toothpick hydrofoils with 97% of their mass so far above the waterline that not even Ellison likes to think about it. If you took one out into the open sea through the Golden Gate you wouldn’t likely be coming back.

There is always business in great waters, but the irony is that having won the legendary yachting trophy back from Switzerland at astronomical cost with an even scarier extreme trimaran, Larry Ellison has become not only an exile from his own sport, but a man who has alienated an American icon. Ablaze with advertising, the fleet of terrifying water striders he’s unleashed may look oddly at home in the shadow of Alcatraz, but nobody ever sailed one into the sunset or up to a dock to hit the town after a week at sea.

Lord knows I tried to get another vintage AC vet to cover the proceedings live, but he pronounced it too boring to bother, though I expect he too will check his TV, for the onboard cameras should make for cracking action. This time around, let’s pay homage to New York and Newport’s heroic investment of blood, sweat, tears, and champagne by rooting for New Zealand, because nothing beats crossing an ocean to race against people who know how to lose the America’s Cup. After all, that’s how we won it in the first place.

For somewhere a long way from anywhere, Nanga Parbat is a pretty lively place. The five-mile-high peak rises from a syntaxis, a center of compression where folding rocks collide and steam spits from its sides as Earth’s ninth-highest mountain rises heavenward as fast as the continents can slide.

Last Sunday, that slow tectonic violence gave way to another kind. A dour platoon of Sunni militants known as Junood ul-Hifa stormed across one of the world’s most idyllic landscapes to slaughter a sleeping party of Ukrainian and Chinese mountaineers.

“The object is to get to the top of the world, not the bottom of the Punjab.”

Blame it on the drones. The attack occurred on the mountain’s west side facing Diamar, a valley on the far side of the Indus that’s a week’s walk and a cultural world away from the Fairy Meadows that roll along a two-mile-high shelf on Nanga Parbat’s northeast slope. Those Elysian Fields look down on the Raikot glacier on one side and up to the Olympian heights of the peak that fills the southern horizon. To get to them you have to climb out of the Indus Valley. After a hair-raising morning on the Tattu road it takes the rest of the day on foot or horseback to climb up through the pines to emerge into an idyll straight from a Persian miniature. Polo is played where the game was born, in front of a mountain twice the size of the Matterhorn, mirrored in a glacial lake.

Two decades ago, the sons of the Mir of Raikot, some of whom have summited the mountain, began turning a cool summer pasture first into a polo field, then a campground, and eventually a lodge for those who come to climb or merely marvel at a magic mountain whose meadow fairies outrank Titania and Oberon, and as pagan demigods are as much persona non grata in the bloody minds of the Taliban as infidel tourists.

This magic mountain’s problem is that, though a long way from anywhere, it’s rather close to Afghanistan. A century ago the Taliban’s Deobandi predecessors turned a gimlet eye on the “Kalash” valleys to the west, which clung to vestiges of the old-time religion from which both the Greek pantheon and the Hindu gods descend—when Kipling was a cub reporter in Lahore, Nanga Parbat overlooked “Kafiristan.”

Since then the religious pluralism of the Raj has disintegrated, and the fundamentalists’ definition of “kafir” has broadened well beyond ultramontane idol worship. Down in the Indus Valley at the mountain’s foot, the ladies in our party had stones thrown at them for appearing bare-armed to cool their heels in the river.

While the identity of the killers is still being sorted, among those assaulted was a local mountain guide, one of the famously hospitable Dards, an ancient and indigenous people whose language antedates Sanskrit, and whose deeds figure in the Mahabharata—a hundred generations ago, these were the go-to guys for the sacred weapons of the Vedic wars.

In the three millennia since, the Dards’ religion has gone with the flow. They were Hindu when Herodotus asked after them as the Dadicae, Zeus-fearing Gandharans in the expeditionary wake of Alexander the Great, Buddhist when the White Huns came tearing through the neighborhood, and Islamic after the Muslim conquest of the 14th century.

Some, like the Dards of Darchik, Garkon, and Da, have faded by gradual intermarriage or been erased from history by abrupt ethnic cleansing—the Talibs reserve their fiercest antipathy for Muslims with whom they religiously disagree. This means trouble for the northernmost mountain people in the arc from Kashmir to the Pamirs whose ancestors became Shia, or Ismaili—Hunza is where the Aga Khan’s great-grandfather took refuge from Wahabi and Deobandi wrath two centuries ago.

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The result is that visitors run a greater risk of culture shock than gunfire—by local lights the perps of the Nanga Parbat massacre are in deep trouble, not so much for shedding innocent blood as violating the laws of hospitality. In a valley where the Talibs hold sway, you may risk stoning if you violate a dress code strict as the Saudis’, but heaven help the man who insults another’s guest. This was the first deliberate attack on tourists or climbers in the region’s history.

In a land of mountains twice the size of the Alps, the cultural shifts can seem as exaggerated as the topography—one valley away from the latest hot spot of the Islamic dark ages, all girls may go to school and women walk abroad proudly bareheaded.

So if you really want to strike a blow against what looks to be the most blatant effort to isolate a beautiful region since Sendero Luminoso set out to drive capitalist tourists out of the Andes, consider an end run around the Taliban—you don’t have to run the fundamentalist gauntlet to get to the hinterland of Nanga Parbat or K2.

Instead of rough-riding it up the Karakoram Highway from Islamabad, with the lawless Northwest Frontier on one flank and a roaring river on the other, just skip the -stans entirely and do a Marco Polo.

Forget Karachi—the object is to get to the top of the world, not the bottom of the Punjab. Mountain weather permitting, you can fly up the Indus Valley from Islamabad or Peshawar to land in Gilgit or Skardu, but a far more intriguing option is to hop a plane to China’s far west instead. After a few days there, acclimating along the jade strewn rivers of Khotan, or the turquoise Karakul lakes on the north side of the great range, head up the old Silk Road to run the Karakoram Highway by jeep from north to south. The pass is a bit of a wheeze at 15,000 feet, but the only folks with guns up there are hunting ibex.

Once you’re over the top, it’s downhill to where the Mir presides over the astoundingly beautiful Hunza Valley. It’s an Ismaili enclave a hundred klicks north and a world away from Pakistan’s present woes, a sort of Islamic Liechtenstein where, in glorious defiance of the Taliban, you can sit down in a hotel with a wine list to toast the ten brave and sporting souls who, instead of taking a strenuous package tour of the top of Everest, died gearing up for a mountain whose fatal attraction is that it has killed a climber for every four to stand on its summit. Anybody for heli-skiing?

The Occupy movement brags that the parks it seized once hosted Depression-era shantytowns. But on the eve of WWII, America heard little talk of class warfare.

Back then the nation’s social fabric remained intact because the 1% employed 2% of the 99% as domestic servants. Back then the 1% pulled their weight.

Today over eight million American households are worth a million dollars or more. I propose that if a fifth of US homes once again had full-time servants, unemployment would be a thing of the past. Tens of millions of new jobs could be created because population growth and the 40-hour week have compounded the number of servants needed to approach—let alone restore—the sort of 24/7 service our grandparents enjoyed.

The collapse of this once-fruitful job sector is largely bureaucracy’s fault. OSHA regulators have made employing live-in help as onerous as running a zoo for endangered species. Politicians who hire under-documented au pairs have put the nouveaux riches in such a funk that encouragement is needed to restore America’s original service industry to its former glory.

“I propose that if a fifth of US homes once again had full-time servants, unemployment would be a thing of the past.”

Let’s start by making servants tax-deductible. No self-respecting nanny state should tax nannies in the first place, and if tax returns countersigned by maids, butlers, and valets earned their masters instant rebates on April 15th, Congress would soon make cooks, chauffeurs, and footmen deductible as well. Communitarian protests at the horrid injustice of it all would fall flat if draconian tax surcharges fell on poltroons who sustain unemployment by mowing their own lawns. Imagine if Occupy members with trust funds were compelled to employ footmen to do their protesting for them.

Once America’s millions of patriotic millionaires realize the housing market is theirs to reflate, they will begin restoring long-idle carriage houses to their intended purpose of housing the revitalized carriage trade’s coachmen. America might even kick its century-old automobile addiction if enough English Literature and Economics MAs can be taught to shoe horses.

Making servants’ wages deductible like mortgage payments would also help service industries to prosper. Sewing machines should whirr as sweatshops vie to create livery both for newly employed servants and those who serve them in turn. Immigration laws will likewise gain new rigor as pols such as Romney and Pelosi, once castigated for under-documented servants, rush to order their IRS-registered kennel men. Even obsolescent TV pundits can be put to work replacing unsightly handicapped ramps with porte-cochères or lecturing Irish maids on the workings of democracy.

Greens should rush to join this reactionary revolution because it promises more than fast freeway lanes for chauffeur-driven electric cars. Besides a return to the delights of home-canned fruit and truly slow cooking, expanded domestic service will enable landowners to strike a blow against OPEC by distilling their own gasohol from corn or cane. When moonshine and rum rations worthy of the British Navy trickle down to junior servants, domestic tranquility will be assured as property owners set their groggy minions to work felling trees to feed their McFireplaces. Where there’s heat, there’s light! Decentralized heating will in turn provide work for youthful chimney sweeps. Superannuated jockeys and basketball players will be removed from welfare rolls, restoring them to gainful employment as lantern-bearers and statuesque torchieres.

Instead of receiving food stamps, millions of semi-illiterates will gain self-respect through the miracle of deductible servitude. The republic will return to a measure of douceur de vivre while reminding the world that America’s native ingenuity is not limited to silicon chips.

Any nation able to turn failed Hollywood writers into Tweeters-for-the-stars ought to be able to create additional pedestrian jobs. With the upper middle classes hiring people to handle their Web-surfing, it may fall on Hamptonites and Malibu residents to employ the rest. If only the government would help them hit the beaches as fast as their sedan chairs can carry them.

My sometime college classmate and debate judge, Al, has just published a very long rant in Rolling Stone. Though I know little of that scene–it’s been years since I last dined with Jagger—I see Al has something interesting to say, as recovering Nobel laureates often do, once he’s gotten the usual pitcher of warm spit out of his system.

I counsel constant vigilance on seeing young Gore in such a mood, for the world’s salvation affords an enchanting pretext for those predisposed to societal intervention, and Al has been known to wave the abolitionist banner at the sight of a cigarette. This time he (or his focus group) actually has a point: The climate change debate has become indistinguishable from professional wrestling.

The Climate Wars are as far removed from scientific discourse as the World Karate Championships are from a match cage full of masked Mexican dwarfs. Although the problem began back in the day when the antics of the two WWFs, wildlife and wrestling, were still distinguishable, the gorgeous Georges, Rushes, and Glenns of yack radio and TV have kicked the nonsense up a notch by focusing on scientific noise to the complete exclusion of signal. When was the last time you saw a climate scientist complete a sentence on TV, let alone a paragraph?

“The Climate Wars are as far removed from scientific discourse as the World Karate Championships are from a match cage full of masked Mexican dwarfs.”

This change in media strategy is an exercise not in science, but semiotics, the increasingly dark art of creating and manipulating symbols. It scarcely signifies which of the usual K Street suspects authored Fox’s latest gambit, or whether the bills are paid by the Koch’s petroleum coke or the soft coal in Rupert Murdoch’s ancestral backyard. The content, or lack of it, testifies that the talking heads who are supposed to defend us against regulation and carbon rationing have been told to quit arguing about climate science and talk down to their audience on science itself. This they do in true postmodern fashion by denying that anybody’s science is better than the other fellow’s. Having denounced relativism with every other breath, they sure know how to practice what they preach.

And how to forget the past as prologue—it is quite a spectacle to see the right attempting to rerun Steve Gould and Carl Sagan’s generation-old gambit of appealing to their own authority while indulging in prime-time number-fudging. The evidence of this ranges from vanity-press journals with PR copy presented as though it were peer-reviewed scholarship, to the barmy bafflegab of a bona fide peer, a bug-eyed Old Harrovian named Christopher Monckton. This crack cricketer’s quack Question Time is quite delightful, for he is numerate enough to serve as the Daily Telegraph’s Sudoku editor, and it is a joy to watch him bowl over the cranks, carnival barkers, and octogenarian emeriti annually assembled for the Tea Party science fair laid out by Heartland and Discovery Institute.

The purpose of all this sound and fury is simple. It serves to distract us, quite literally, from the clouds slowly gathering overhead.

The atmosphere is the Earth’s most subtle dynamic system, chaotic in its motion, majestic in its flow, and a mass of gas so vast that some of what goes up into it takes centuries to come down. Your personal share of it—its mass divided by the nearly seven billion souls now living—comes to the better part of a million tons, so what possible harm could one do by burning a ton or two a year of fossil fuel? After all, we exhale CO2, as does every other living creature from Bambi to Shamu the whale.

The answer, alas, is rather a lot, because when you convert from tons to volume, what we generate dwarfs what we exhale. So let me try to school Al in symbol creation: Forget about inflating party balloons. Civilization’s CO2 emission already amounts to a fully inflated Hindenburg popping into existence in the sky once every second. One Hindenburg looks kind of cute tied up to the Empire State Building or Pier Six, but imagine 3,600 cigars the size of the QE III materializing overhead every hour, 24/7. That’s enough to spread a solid roof of dirigibles over Manhattan in twenty minutes and adumbrate everything coastwise from Lakehurst to the Hamptons in five days flat. And how much solar heat does this veritable vergeltungs flotte trap? To keep up with the rate at which CO2 is already downloading solar energy into the oceans, each virtual Hindenburg would have to toss five A-bombs into the drink every second. O the humanity! O the menhaden!

Now for the bad news—we’ve been at it for fully five generations, and herding the hundreds of tons of new CO2 in your share of the air into a cloud directly overhead, like the one that used to follow Li’l Abner’s sidekick around, extends over our personal share of the global commons out to where it bumps into the next guy or gal’s. Either way, it won’t look good at Ascot, so don’t be surprised if Al decides to throw it in the ring for his final shot next Inauguration Day.

When it comes to intelligent discussion about how science, climate policy, and free markets should intersect, Al is running unopposed. Republicans, and the Tea Party in particular, have only their talking heads to blame.

]]>Articles by Russell SeitzA Good Day in Abbottabadtag:takimag.com,2011:article/1.115932011-05-04T04:02:54Z2011-05-03T18:23:56ZRussell Seitzrussellseitz@gmail.com

Abbottabad, Pakistan

Though Abbottabad’s eponymous founder might approve of the rough justice OBL received there early Monday morning, something is very wrong with the establishment that calls the old cantonment home.

Neither Sandhurst nostalgia nor Punjabi equivocation can explain a respect for privacy that extended to quartering a private army mere yards from a national war college’s fences, or the repression of gossip as to why an all-mod-cons McMansion set in a walled park should not boast that oldfangled convenience, a telephone.

Abbottabad long ago rode its attractive location to outstrip the other outposts of Victorian Empire dotting the Indus. It became an emerging nuclear power’s seat of military education and a retirement town for many of its senior intelligence executives. In simmering South Asia, what’s not to like about a hill station featuring umpteen holes of golf, a polo club where handicapped players are the norm, and hot and cold running service personnel?

“After Monday morning’s blazing forty-minute firefight, one wonders what the hell they drank in the heli on the long flight home.”

Yet national security establishments are, after all, about security, and that security was breached from top to bottom in allowing Osama bin Laden to achieve an undeserved measure of domestic tranquility inside what amounts to a gated retirement community abutting Pakistan’s West Point.

Now as in the days of Major Abbott, the road to OBL’s side of Abbottabad very much resembles Mulholland Drive. There at the base of a small but perfect range of verdant mountains is an old polo club testifying to the horse-healthy climate that enchanted Abbott in the first place. In addition to the upscale swaths of retirement villas on the hillsides and the manicured lawns of its military academies and think tanks, the town runs downhill and down-market along its river into a raffish noncom cantonment whose souks offer wedding turbans fashioned of fresh-pressed money, animal figures encrusted in mirror fragments to evade Koranic censure as graven images, and billboards touting guaranteed cures for the dental and venereal diseases of man and beast.

Compared to what lies further up the Karakoram Highway, which claws its way into the clouds as it snakes up through Hunza to the Chinese border, Abbottabad seems a pretty civilized place—an illusion that evaporates along with English as a second language as soon as you wander off from its cosmopolitan core.

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Never mind the Taliban—you have to go thirty miles out of town to meet the avidly art-dynamiting classes, but a few blocks back into the less attractive suburbs are plenty of madrasahs offering an education that begins with the first sura and ends with the last—the left-hand side of Pakistan’s bell curve rivals America’s Republican base in its aversion to reading more than one book per lifetime. This extremity of cultural conservatism is not new to a region already overrun by religious students in Major Abbott’s day. On his watch, Deobandi talibs lit out to converge on pleasant towns such as Abbottabad like Mormon missionaries high on iced tea.

United by common bonds of zeal and a powerful aversion to fact-checking, these God-fearing folk began welcoming infidel tourists a hundred and fifty years ago. Today their descendants still insist the best way to persuade visiting ladies that it is impious to reveal they have arms is to vigorously lapidate them until they roll down their sleeves in surrender to Allah’s will. Thankfully, this lets up when you cross the cultural divide into Ismaili territory somewhere between Nanga Parbat and K2, but to return downstream to Abbottabad, you have to run the cultural gauntlet all over again, a daunting prospect of immense desiccation through the neo-prohibitionist badlands. Only a paladin-turned-sourpuss such as OBL could discount wild rumors of sports and senior officer’s clubs stocked with the liquid spoils of empire.

So with our onetime ally in the battle against the Soviets fallen from his weak horse and deep-sixed by the SEALs, one question may determine whether Pakistan is our ally or not. A long time ago, Abbottabad’s end of the silk route flowed with Shiraz from Shiraz, and Peshawar’s bazaars saw jade from Khotan transformed into wine cups fit for a Mughal—that’s how to run a caliphate. After Monday morning’s blazing forty-minute firefight, one wonders what the hell they drank in the heli on the long flight home.

]]>Articles by Russell SeitzThe Neocon Lyretag:takimag.com,2008:article/1.95882008-10-12T16:29:00Z1999-11-30T00:00:00ZRussell Seitzrussellseitz@gmail.comWhat a Rich Pyre!, by Russell Setiz
Being a poem in the style of “Under Which Lyre?” WH Auden’s adieu to WWII, which Norman Podhoretz ought to have read before taking the poet’s name in vain in his epic fantasy, World War IV.

The Bushies at last have quit the field,
The Weekly Standard’s bloodstains yield
To seeping showers,
As in their convalescent state
The Neocons associate
With Thomas Powers

Encamped upon the college plain
Neither Kristol can explain
What Strauss endorses;
Nor Hanson with Laconic tongue
Shepherd the battle-weary young
Through Persian courses.

Among the shattered appliances
Of the darker arts and sciences
They stroll or run,
As those that steeled themselves to slaughter
Aim their laughter at the shorter
Odes of Frum.

Professors back from Baghdad’s frissons
Resume their proper eruditions,
Though some regret it;
Although Kevlar can be hot ,
They wore theirs indoors, and will not
Let you forget it.

So did we all, but Zeus’ decree
About the will-to-disagree
Is now pandemic,
Ordains all calls to Recht und Ordnung
Should fall as flat as waterboarding,
Though treason’s endemic,

Ares will doze. A worse war
Internecine flares once more
‘Twixt those who’ll follow
Cheney all the way
And those who now with qualms obey
POTUS Apollo.

Brutal like all Olympic games,
Though fought with smiles and Christian names
And less dramatic,
This dialectic strife between
The Neocons could be foreseen,
As more fanatic.

What high immortals do in mirth
But amplifies the Beltway’s girth;
Where a-historic
Antipathy forever gripes
All ages and somatic types,
‘Tis sophomoric

To face the future’s darkest hints.
Young J-Pod scarfs another blintz
As stout as Cortez,
So not to think, and thus turn pale,
On how a target like a whale
Invites cruel sorties

Though shot towards heaven in the halls
Of Neo-periodicals
By erstwhile friends,
The tracer fire of small magazines
Often rips through grunt Marines
As it descends.

So Editors we see today
Can only do their best and pray
Wars really oughtn’t
From Euphrates ever shrink;
Lest someone somewhere pause to think
It’s not important.

If such would leave the world alone,
Apollo would smile from his throne,
Fasces and falcons
He loves to rule, has always done it
This lot would be hard pressed to run
A summit in the Balkans.

For jealous of their godlike dreams,
They persevere in secret schemes
To rule the heart;
Unable to invent the lyre,
Create with simulated fire
Official art.

Yet when in one Chicago college,
Truth’s replaced by arcane Knowledge;
Sense may take offence,
And Democracy’s Nirvana
Pay the price: Hart’s for Obama
And Buckley Bush repents.

Yet still our arms, we must confess,
At least on Fox show some success,
Though Islam raves
From Indus to Hormuz, and the news
In lesser New York book reviews
Is very grave.

Rush Radio hammers all day long
Its over-Whitmanated song
That does not scan,
With adjectives laid end to end,
Like rolling Oxycontin to commend
Chicago Man.

Their Policy’s no lyric thing,
Devoid of sport, and love and spring.
All blood and bluster
In the White House, Spartan bards
Rehash 300 into yards
Of epic filibuster.

In fake Hermetic uniforms
Behind our battle-line, in swarms
To warm the fighting,
Neo-existentialists declare
That they forswear complete despair,
And go on writing.

No matter; they shall be defied
With Aphrodite at our side:
What though they let
In Intel quite diseased
Zeus willing, honest NIE’s,
Shall beat them yet.

So in our morale must be our strength.
If we are to behold at length
Routed Osama’s
Last battalions melt away like fog,
Eschew The Weekly Standard Decalogue,
Of melodramas:

Do not as the West Wing pleases,
Write not any doctor’s thesis
On abstinence education,
Whilst electing, thou and thine
To lie, Anne Coulter-like, supine
Before Administration.

Neither fib to questionnaires
Or quizzes on K-Street affairs,
Nor in compliance
With statisticians fit
In false knowledge, nor commit
To deny science.

Thou shall not be on friendly terms
With focus groups and PR firms
Who fear the Muses far too much
To read the Bible for its prose.
Nor, by Jove, make love to those
Who worship such.

Let them live beyond their means
On Tigris water and raw greens.
If you must choose
Between tickets, follow Reagan’s muse.
Forget Faction. Trust in God,
And take broad views.

” It’s not the dumbing-down that bothers a lot of us fogeys so much, it’s the loss of interest in things and stuff.”

I’ll say- gone are the days when Massachusetts and California overflowed with the not so wretched refuse of a domestic electronics industry that has since largely gone abroad , and government surplus property offices dished out a high tech cornucopia for pennies on the dollar of taxpayer money invested. The high water mark was the sale of bona fide Titan II ICBM engines fourteen feet tall to any wannabe rocket scientist with a thousand bucks and a truck,

Hence the attraction of the second career of John Ratzenberger, AKA “Cliff Clalvin”. The former Cheers] actor is founder of the Nuts, Bolts, and Thingamajigs Foundation, “dedicated to raising awareness of skilled trades and engineering disciplines among young people.” . On the O’Reily Show he expressed “ unhappiness at the fact that young Americans don’t tinker any more.”

This bothers Derb” much more than kids not reading or going to art galleries.” But rejoice- technophilia has gone wild at a California fair sponsored by Make Magazine, where ,in a counterblast to anodyne OSHA regulations that felonize sharp objects and mandate chemical-free chemistry sets , fire engines belch celebratory fire, robots strut the midway, and home-brew lightning flashes from ten-foot Tesla coils.

The sight of Muffin Cars with roaring turbines out-segueing Segways may make Congressman Waxman cringe, and greens flee in terror, yet a merry old time was had by young and old, including a fellow:

” holding forth in a vintage British military uniform and pith helmet, and is gesturing with a hand that holds a sloshing tankard of ale. “We’ve been told by corporate America that we cannot fix the things we own,” John O’Hare told a somewhat shell shocked reporter from The New York Times: “All we can do is buy their stuff and like it.Cars have become too complex to work on under a shade tree, and people have no idea what is inside their cellphones and cameras. “All this technology, and it’s not ours. It’s somebody else’s, Make is about taking that back off and making it yours.”

the Steampunk enthusiast universally known as Major Catastrophe told the NY Times. He stood out from the other 65.000 attendees by virtue of having arrived in this three story Victorian mansion on wheels.

This gearhead extravaganza sounds like serious Red State Stuff, and though such events began in the San Francisco Bay fever swamps that spawned the Home Brew Computer Club and the PC, the sponsoring magazine, www.make.com , is starting another Maker Faire in Austin Texas, with plans to expand the franchise.

Boring as media culture has become, the heartland continues to cherish and fire the intellectual independence that ignited the Goldwater movement and led to the Reagan revolution. It is one thing for libertarians to remove to the Nevada desert for an annual anarchist potlatch, quite another when Middle California breaks out of its smoke-free suburbs, and starts waving pitchforks and propeller beanies at the culture of regulation. MacGyvver gave way to Mythbusters, What will the sequel be to The Boys [and now The Girl’s ] Book Of Dangerous Things ?

]]>Articles by Russell SeitzAlcohol-Tobacco-Firearms: The Hunt For Red Novembertag:takimag.com,2008:article/1.98642008-05-05T19:52:00Z1999-11-30T00:00:00ZRussell Seitzrussellseitz@gmail.com

The road to the White House often intersects the path of rapidly moving projectiles. Bravely volunteering to put themselves and their horses, naval vessels and airplanes into the way of arrows bullets , cannonballs torpedoes, and the odd destroyer launched Jackson, Tyler, Lincoln, Grant, Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Bush 41 into the Oval Office ,and Senator McCain’s close encounter with a SAM in Nam has placed him in hot pursuit.

This puts paid to the Churchillian chestnut that there is nothing more exhilarating than being fired upon without effect, though as Dole and Kerry can testify, it is a political mystery why actually getting hit is nowhere near as effective. As a general rule, the larger the platform or unit commanded when clobbered , the more memorable the presidency, a regiment or PT boat outweighing a platoon , flatboat or a river launch, though it is possible to over- or under-achieve .
Getting his destroyer sunk instead of using it to set some aspirant German politician floundering in the Med merely subjected Earl Mountbatten to the indignity of being the last viceroy of a vanished empire, and the mere rumor of Senator Clinton sharing a county with a Ruritanian sniper has not served her candidacy well.

Were the Vegas paintball industry to collude with military surplus dealers and demolition derby organizers between now and November , they might come up with an aquatic theme park for aspirant politicians on the shores of Lake Mead. There. for a hefty fee, sensibly armored aspirants to high office might throw their Kevlar hats in the ring, and try to blow each other out of the air or water, After a few rounds , the fortunes of war would assure them all of the right to retire with slight bruising and well padded resumes, ready to enter the presidential lists at a cost smaller than a focus group directed TV campaign.

Russian, Uzbekh , and possibly Transdnistrian submarines, made redundant by the evaporation of the Warsaw Pact and the Aral Sea can still be had for a scant million, and getting Jimmy Carter sunk in one might rejuvenate his chances of a second term if he upstages Al Gore at the convention.

Prime time naval battles between candidates might easily outdraw presidential debates, justifying production upgrades to SSN’s like the Graustarck,( formerly CCCP Red November) shown here smuggling Kosevar cigarettes into Murmansk
Bolting couches and cribbage and Lepanto boards to the foredeck of a former Whiskey class vessel would afford space for President Carter’s crew of former admirers and campaign workers to applaud the spectacle, while the freedom to re-arrange themselves in the deck chairs on the fantail would assure the transparency of their WIFi connections to the Weekly Standard ‘s Galley Slave blog. Who would not pay to to see Ambassador Keyes take oar to save the world from rising seas by ramming a Titanic lifeboat replica into a styrofoam iceberg ?

]]>Articles by Russell SeitzThreat Deflationtag:takimag.com,2008:article/1.98852008-04-27T23:58:00Z1999-11-30T00:00:00ZRussell Seitzrussellseitz@gmail.comIn Leaderless Jihad, former Foreign Service Officer Marc Sageman, now a University of Pennsylvania professor,distills what he learned from years of reading the daily feed of intelligence, both classified and open source, streaming through the State Department. But Sageman is no mere desk warrior—he went to see the forces of terror in action on their own turf in Afghanistan, and has combed the files on the jihadist organizations that operate there still.

First, there is a cluster left over from the struggles in Afghanistan against the Soviets in the 1980s. Currently they are huddled around, and hiding out with, Mr. bin Laden somewhere in Afghanistan and/or Pakistan. This band, concludes Sageman, probably consists of a few dozen individuals.

Joining them in the area, although perhaps with more on the periphery, are 100 more fighters left over from al-Qaeda’s golden days in Afghanistan in the 1990s. These key portions of the enemy forces would total, then, less than 150 actual people. They may operate something resembling “training camps,” but these appear to be quite minor affairs. They also assist with the Taliban’s far larger and very troublesome insurgency in Afghanistan.

Beyond this, concludes Sageman, the third group consists of thousands of sympathizers and would-be jihadists spread around the globe who mainly connect in Internet chat rooms, engage in radicalizing conversations, and variously dare each other actually to do something.

All of these rather hapless, even pathetic, people, should of course be considered to be potentially dangerous. From time to time they may be able to coalesce enough to carry out acts of terrorist violence, and policing efforts to stop them before they can do so are fully justified. But the notion that they present an existential threat to just about anybody seems at least as fanciful as some of their schemes, and any notion that these characters could come up with nuclear weapons seems far fetched in the extreme.

The threat presented by these individuals is likely, concludes Sageman, simply to fade away in time. Unless, of course, the United States overreacts and does something to enhance their numbers, prestige, and determination—something that is, needless to say, entirely possible.

I’ve checked this remarkable and decidedly unconventional evaluation of the threat with three prominent experts who have spent years studying the issue. They generally agree with Sageman.

One of them is Fawaz Gerges of Sarah Lawrence College, whose brilliant book, The Far Enemy, based on hundreds of interviews in the Middle East, parses the jihadist enterprise. As an additional concern, he suggests that Sageman’s third group may also include a small, but possibly growing, underclass of disaffected and hopeless young men in the Middle East, many of them scarcely literate, who, outraged at Israel and at America’s war in Iraq, may provide cannon fodder for the jihad. However, these people would mainly present problems in the Middle East (including in Iraq), not elsewhere.

Another way to evaluate the threat presented by jihadist terrorists around the world is to focus on the actual amount of violence perpetrated by Muslim extremists since 9/11 outside of war zones. Included in the count would be terrorism of the much-publicized and fear-inducing sort that occurred in Bali in 2002, in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Turkey in 2003, in the Philippines, Madrid, and Egypt in 2004, and in London and Jordan in 2005.

Two think-tank publications have independently provided lists of such incidents. Although these tallies make for grim reading, the total number of people killed comes to some 200 or 300 per year. That, of course, is 200 or 300 per year too many, but it hardly suggests that the perpetrators present a major threat, much less an existential one. For comparison: over the same period far more people have drowned in bathtubs in the United States alone.”

In 2004, I found that estimates of al-Qaeda’s potentially armed forces had fallen as low as 3,000 highly dispersed individuals, with a technical cadre far below the threshold of autonomous development of nuclear arms—the ‘existential threat ’ threshold, and reluctantly concluded that 9-11, like Pearl Harbor or the Trojan Horse, was intrinsically unique- its mastermind, and literal architect having self destructed along with the element of surprise.

I want to closely examine Sageman’s book,and invite readers to do likewise. Because if OBL’s franchise has fallen below regimental strength, the tempo of GWOT operations may stand in need of adjustment. The nuclear genie remains a valid cold war metaphor, but predicating policy on mythology remains a risky business -Djinn are famously stingy in dispensing their favors, and rarely come in a refillable bottle. Little wonder Homeland Security’s latest effort at self justification extends to adding hand grenades to its list of Weapons of Mass Destruction .

]]>Articles by Russell SeitzWhat al Sweilem party it Istag:takimag.com,2008:article/1.98922008-04-23T09:13:00Z1999-11-30T00:00:00ZRussell Seitzrussellseitz@gmail.comIn what may count as the first wine commercial starring a Wahabi mullah, Omar Al-Sweilem waxes lyrical on what awaits the suicide bombing classes on the first 72 of their 1001 Arabian nights in Paradise: the text hardly does credit to Al Sweilem’s performance, which I suggest you lay back on your musk scented cushions and view here in its John Belushi worthy entirety

“Harith Ibn Al-Muhasibi told us what would happen when we meet the black-eyed virgin with her black hair and white face - praised be He who created night and day.

“What hair! What a chest! What a mouth! What cheeks! What a figure! What breasts! What thighs! What legs! What whiteness! What softness! Without any creams - no Nivea, no Vaseline. No nothing!”

“He said that faces would be soft that day. Even your own face will be soft without any powder or makeup. You yourself will be soft, so how soft will a black-eyed virgin be, when she comes to you so tall and with her beautiful face, her black hair and white face - praised be He who created night and day. “

“He said: How soft will a fingertip be, after being softened in paradise for thousands of years! There is no god but Allah. He told us that if you entered one of the palaces, you would find 10 black-eyed virgins sprawled on musk cushions.”

“When they see you, they will get up and run to you. Lucky is the one who gets to put her thumb in your hand. When they get hold of you, they will push you onto your back, on the musk cushions. They will push you onto your back, Jamal! Allah Akbar! I wish this on all people present here.

“He said that one of them would place her mouth on yours. Another one would press her cheek against yours, yet another would press her chest against yours, and the others would await their turn. There is no god but Allah.”

And now for the Commercial:

“He told us that one black-eyed virgin would give you a glass of wine. Wine in Paradise is a reward for your good deeds. The wine of this world is destructive, but not the wine of the world to come.”

But what’s it to be?

Shiraz from Shiraz? The amontillado of al Andalus? Or that great Lebanese standby, the Roger Scruton and Auberon Waugh( Blessings and peace be upon them ) approved vin de garde of the Bekaa valley,

Bimini: Great news—no going back to Fort Lauderdale. The good ship Hegemonic has just been bought by some Greek tycoon who thinks we deserve a longer vacation!
Eleuthera: Captain says the new owner has set a new itinerary including South Georgia—Savannah maybe?
East of Grenada: Had consommé poolside with Fred Barnes. Bill Kristol had us in stitches with his imitation of Robert Maxwell walking the plank.
The Equator: Our satellite link is toast. John Podhoretz dissed King Neptune’s people about Georgia being in the opposite direction, and had the NavSat card in his pocket when they keelhauled him. So much for real time blogging.
Devil’s Island: Put Senator Craig and Congressman Foley ashore with the ship’s goat.
South Georgia: Stopped to pick up sheep, put out more flags, and lay wreath at tomb of the unknown Daily Telegraph correspondent.
Beagle Channel: Native canoes came alongside offering Inca Pisco, Vicuna coats, and a neat new powdered soft drink called Coca Coca.
Cape Horn: Ambasador Bolton and Bill Kristol went ashore to pay a courtesy call on General Pinochet’s brain.
Elephant Island: Locals in white tie crowded Bill Kristol’s gala dinner, but dove overboard during his speech, sticking Barnes with a whinging caviar bar bill .
Pitcairn: Landed after 100 days at sea, but the newsstand here refuses to stock our mag until stocks of The American Mercury and Look are exhausted.
Easter Island: Finished giant stone head of Rupert Murdoch this afternoon—damn white coral contact lenses kept falling out.
East of Java: Bill Bennett broke the bank at chemmy last night, but lost the last of his Virtue sequel advance playing Hold Em. Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes put in irons after jumping ship on a raft made of Mai Tai umbrellas.
Wiki Wiki: Pursued by proas flogging the pidgin edition of The Economist. Goldberg and Barnes beat them off by flinging remaindered copies of Liberal Fascism.
Tanna island, Vanuatu: Cargo Cult here hailed David as John Frum’s long lost heir after he stopped the volcano erupting by tossing in Ann Coulter.
Christmas Island: Tried out the Vanuatu Letters of Marque and Reprisal David got in exchange for poor Anne, but The Nation Seminar at Sea aboard Oosterdam gave us the slip in the fog.
Demerara: The Pusser’s distillery gave the former Sec Def a 151 Rum salute while the AA crowd went inland to Jonestown to chill out with Pina Koolaidas.
Bequia: After practicing their harpooning skills on J-Pod, the recreational whaling seminar guys scored a humpback. Locals very impressed
Guantanamo Bay: Camp X-Ray Commander nixed our landing to buy Cohibas, but Cuban pilot says we’re assured a warm reception down the coast.
Bahia Cocinas: Some welcome. Venezuela’s Secretary Of The Navy For Life was waiting to offer his submarine for next years “Weekly Standard North Pole Cruise.” He offered to drop David off in Havana in exchange for his Canadian passport.
Dry Tortugas: Free at last! Crude oil spiked again and the owner ordered Hegemonic converted to an oil tanker, and gave us this nifty trireme to row home. All we have to do is find the oars, and some Dramamine for the ship’s cat.